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Trauma-Informed Pedagogy Annotated Bibliography for ACS Members

When traumatic events or chronic stressors disrupt students’ lives, they can experience a loss of purpose and meaning. Explicitly building opportunities to find meaning and purpose in class content and/or assignments can help some students to recover these losses.

Purpose and Meaning: Small steps

Encourage students to consider, in discussion and/or assignments, how they will tie course content to: values that are personally important to them, their future careers, and to their community activism and engagement

Purpose and Meaning: Learn more

  • Cohen, Geoffrey L. & Sherman, David K. (2014). The Psychology of Change: Self-Affirmation and Social Psychological Intervention. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 333-371. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115137 

    • This article is an excellent summary of the research literature on the importance of affirming our core values as a way to increase feelings of belonging and engagement and to reduce stereotype threat in academic contexts.

    • To learn more about how values affirmation addresses the racial achievement gap, see 

      • Cohen, G. L., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., & Master, A. (2006). Reducing the racial achievement gap: A social-psychological intervention. Science, 313 (5791), 1307-1310. DOI: 10.1126/science.1128317

      • Cohen, G. L., Garcia, J., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Apfel, N., & Brzustoski, P. (2009). Recursive processes in self-affirmation: Intervening to close the minority achievement gap. Science, 324 (5925), 400-403. DOI: 10.1126/science.1170769

    • To learn more about how values affirmation addresses the gender achievement gap, see

      • Miyake, A., Kost-Smith, L. E., Finkelstein, N. D., Pollock, S. J., Cohen, G. L., & Ito, T. A. (2010). Reducing the gender achievement gap in college science: A classroom study of values affirmation. Science, 330 (6008), 1234-1237. DOI: 10.1126/science.119599

    • To learn more about how values affirmation addresses the first generation/continuing generation achievement gap, see

      • Harackiewicz, J. M., Canning, E. A., Tibbets, Y., Giffen, C. J., Blair, S. S., Rouse, D. I., & Hyde, J. S. (2014). Closing the social class achievement gap for first-generation students in undergraduate biology. Journal of Educational Psychology, 106 (2), 375-389. DOI: 10.1037/a0034679